Many companies strive to be “customer-centric” but how many of them actually succeed? In order to truly put your customer’s needs first, to have them receive exceptional service, the experience you give your customers needs to be thoughtful. It needs to be personal. And most importantly, what you give your customers needs to be valuable. To achieve this, you must allocate time, money, and resources in ensuring your customer’s experience with your company is a positive one. Their experience needs to keep them coming back for the value you provide, and to refer your products and services to others.
Defining Customer Success
“Customer success” is exactly what the phrase says. Your customers are more successful when they use your products or services. It is the how part of a customer experience. How your customers obtain value.
Where customer support is reactively helping people solve their problems, customer success proactively provides solutions and guides them through their journey. By prioritizing proactive customer management, you can optimize your servicing strategy, retain existing customers, and develop advocates for your company.
Customer success, or CS, is becoming a conventional function in SaaS (software as a service) organizations. However, the underlying methods of CS are relevant to other industries as well. Gainsight, a leader in the customer success space, goes into detail about CS in their online guide:
“Customer success is a business method that uses your product or service to help customers achieve their objectives. It’s relationship-focused client management that aligns your customer with your company’s goals-igniting beneficial outcomes for everyone involved.”
Gainsight – the essential guide to customer success
Customer Success done poorly
This section highlights ways I’ve seen customer success attempted half-heartedly, resulting in customer dissatisfaction or company dysfunction.
Confusing success and support
Many technology companies will treat their CS staff as ‘glorified support’. Meaning, they give the staff interesting titles, slightly higher wages than support staff, and customer success responsibilities. But then they also expect them to fight customer crises all the time, acting as front-line support in addition to their proactive customer management duties. Front-line customer support is important for any service, but it’s distinctly separate from customer success management functions.
Reliance on personal relationships
Customer success is a term heard in the software and technology landscape, but it also applies to other industries. Regardless of industry, positive relationships with clients can be made and maintained at a personal level. When sales depend on those personal connections, staff retention and well-being are vital. Where a company can build up an esteemed reputation with talented staff and service, they can only rely on that good reputation for so long if those people aren’t retained and looked after in the business. Maintaining a workplace where staff want to work hard and develop relationships for your business, is more sustainable when you focus on a healthy inclusive culture over individual gains.
An over-focus on sales
Organizations can also focus overwhelmingly on new sales versus trying to maintain their customer base. For most businesses, the customer pool is limited, and ignoring customer satisfaction means making larger sales targets increasingly difficult to achieve (as if always growing annual revenue wasn’t hard enough!). If you don’t also focus on customer retention, you’ll find it nearly impossible to hit those growth targets.
Undervaluing people
As mentioned in the support vs. success discussion, many people perceive CS as the same as reactive customer support, dealing with tickets as they come. When this attitude comes from leaders in the organization, it can lead to certain staff being undervalued.
Managing customers, planning out and delivering an experience that will keep them coming back to your organization, is a difficult job. It takes multi-talented people to carry it out successfully. Problems arise when the people you’re leaning on for your customer’s success don’t get the recognition, compensation, or support that should come with the responsibility and pressure you’re putting on them. Even low performers won’t stick around for long if they aren’t getting what they feel is a fair trade. And training or hiring new staff costs more than retaining them.
Customer Success done right
The importance of customers
In any business, customer satisfaction is imperative. If they love working with you, love what you have to offer, they will do a lot of sales and marketing for you. A client’s word that your offering is worth checking out, will help convince new prospects to come on board. We know that reoccurring revenue, from the same customer year on year, is more reliable and needs fewer resources to ‘win’ than new sales too.
Sales & marketing
In a services business, much of your work comes from existing and former clients, such as contracting with them or getting referrals. Additionally, when a main contact leaves a company, they may bring you in to work with their new organization. Maintaining positive relationships with decision-makers in those organizations provide an increased chance of winning more projects with them. A rigorous bidding process will be more involved than your average product sale, but your firm’s reputation for delivering and existing relationships are still important. When I’ve seen this successfully practiced, the staff who manage these types of relationships are held in esteemed positions. Such as principal engineering consultants, bringing in and attracting more work for their services company.
Delivering value
No matter what you name your CS roles (account managers, project managers, CSMs, customer service, solutions architects, implementation specialists), they all are responsible for aspects of the customer journey. They proactively lead your clients or users to realize value through their engagement with you.
When we talk about software and service hybrid models, customer success is not a nice-to-have. Regardless of what you call these roles, without designated customer success agents your product/service hybrid delivery won’t live up to expectations. Organizations that embrace software-leveraged services, find themselves able to focus their time and energy on developing their software solutions and customer strategy in tandem. If a customer needs help using the software or isn’t expected to use it much at all, they need your organization to ensure they get value out of your applications.
This case study is an example of where I helped inexperienced staff successfully become experts and bridge the gap between a young software product and the fully matured customer experience that was expected: https://erinjquon.com/scaling-success-with-a-self-starter-mindset/
Improving products and services
Customer success personnel have intimate knowledge of your customers, but also of the value your company offers. Everyone in CS needs to have a working knowledge of what you’re selling. They may not be an expert on how it’s made or the programming behind it. Nor may they be particularly savvy at selling it. But your CS personnel are your super-users. For a product-based B2B organization, CS professionals know exactly what your product is, how to use it, and how to train your customers to integrate with it.
Take advantage of those skills and knowledge. In the section above, I touched on the issue of undervaluing CS staff. Both through my own experiences, and of those around me, I’ve seen positive outcomes when customer success personnel are given responsibility and ownership around company products and services. For one, they understand your customers as well, or better, than anyone else. Two, they experience your product every day. And three, good CS staff will be able to plan ahead and actually execute. Put those ingredients together, and you have a great recipe for improving your goods and services.
What a good structure looks like
Implementing a simple structure with clear boundaries is a great way to set your team up for success, and therefore keep your customers happy. You can break customer success down, simply, into four areas of specialization: pre-sales; onboarding; adoption; and growth. In smaller, or newer organizations, I recommend looking at hybrid roles. Where one person may be responsible for more than one stage or function in each customer’s journey. As a company grows and matures, roles will change and boundaries will get drawn and re-drawn, in order to ensure excellent customer experience continues.
Defining what is ‘value’
Before we get into processes, it’s important to have clarity on what value you’re creating. A founder may have a vision, but if that vision is not well communicated, misalignments can run rampant internally and negatively affect your customers. Start by identifying what is the problem you’re trying to solve. Move on to your customer. Then, your solution and what makes it unique.
Collaboratively ideating and defining the unique value of your product or service, helps ensure your team is aligned across different departments and roles. Once established, a delivery framework specific to your solution can be created.
Knowing what your value proposition is will also help make sure your sales team is spending time on the correct targets. It will also enable your product teams to prioritize adequately.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is a holistic view of what your ideal customer goes through when they engage with your company. A typical journey emphasizes the many stages that lead up to making a sale, converting, and then ensuring future purchases. In customer success, it’s important to lay out the pre-sales aspect of the journey, but don’t let it overshadow the other stages. Your sales team will focus more on acquisitions and upselling, but they won’t go into much depth for active customer experience. Sales focus on the fact that value is delivered, while customer success focuses on how that value is delivered.
Each stage of the customer journey should have clear ownership. Basic needs include: who is involved in which stage, and what they do; how they interact internally, and with the customer. Identify key milestones, and track the customer’s progress reaching them, as they are led through the customer journey.
As an organization matures, processes, tools, and methods can be developed for each stage. Data can be used to identify, early, engagements at risk to go awry. This journey framework becomes a touchstone for new members of your company, who frantically try to figure out what the heck they are supposed to be doing.
Roles & Responsibilities
Writing down your customer journey and defining your value is broad. You know what problem, or problems, you’re trying to solve. You also know how your products and services solve that problem. While they help general alignment, and especially alignment across different teams, they don’t tell you what is expected out of people at an individual level. Now you need to identify who is responsible for ensuring what value is achieved.
Identifying what functions are necessary is a good place to start. Looking at your customer journey map, you can identify key ‘jobs’ that will have to be done. You might need to spend some time brainstorming and testing out combinations. Can one person do all of those jobs? How many different roles are needed? Which responsibilities can be grouped together?
Once the boundaries are made and roles are defined, the next step is to clearly articulate each role’s accountabilities. Are there any shared responsibilities, and what is the escalation process for when problems inevitably arise?
The most common role in a customer success organization is the CSM (customer success manager). However, there are different roles that can be part of your CS organization too. Including those who focus on pre-sales, onboarding or implementation, and varied project management roles. Some companies have a specific role that focuses on growth. And sometimes, more conventional customer support functions are incorporated into the CS organization.
Performance management
Since customer success often gets a bad reputation for dissatisfied or underappreciated employees, laying out performance expectations and career tracks are great ways to counter those concerns. These are some examples that increase transparency and make it easier for managers to be good managers. If you’re not convinced good management is important, I urge you to read The Importance of Good Leaders And Managers.
- Performance reviews – which ensure employees are provided ample opportunity to give and receive feedback.
- Roles and levels – outline the different functions and levels of seniority in each role.
- Accountabilities – what each role and level are accountable for, and what is needed to get to the next level.
- Career track – a way to show employees how they can reach progressively more senior levels.
With a transparent performance management system, when an employee contests fairness, it’s a much easier discussion and resolution than without that transparency. It also makes it easier for an employee to see their own potential progression, such as: is their current career track a good fit for them or not. This helps with employee retention too. Since you’re customer-centric, your CS staff are amongst your most prized employees. You better work to keep them happy!
Operations
Sometimes overlooked, is the function of customer operations. Now that you have all your systems set up, are they actually working? Are customers satisfied? Is revenue being maintained or going up? Is value being delivered? Are targets and milestones being hit? Is anyone managing, maintaining, and improving these systems?
More often than not, the responsibility for tracking these things falls to the next organized, process-oriented individual. This methodology works if you’re embracing those hybrid roles or shared responsibilities. Sometimes no one tracks this stuff, which can create challenges when you need to report to stakeholders or scale up delivery.
In customer operations, it’s important to establish processes, but not over-process. In customer success, your employees need to have enough freedom and room for creativity in their work. It can be difficult to figure out what is enough.
Some key metrics or identifiers to track include: customer health score; individual and team performance; revenue metrics; customer feedback; engagement (eg. monthly/weekly active users); net-promoter-score; issue resolution time.
Situations to be wary of
Customer success is a rewarding field to be a part of. You get to see firsthand what your products and services help people achieve. These employees are usually the first to hear positive feedback and receive personal thanks. But there are drawbacks to CS as well.
Being so close to the customer, CS professionals are often the ones to hear the negative feedback first. They may hear it more often and more directly than other employees. In organizations where this feedback isn’t well received internally, that leaves CS folks in a tricky position between an unhappy customer and a value proposition that’s missed the mark. Since customer success typically doesn’t get to decide who to sell to, good servicing of those customers might not be possible.
Another casualty of customer success is the employee who cares too much. Empathy and conscientiousness tend to be good personality traits for folks in customer-facing roles. However, caring too much about your customer’s success can lead to overwork and stress. It’s important to put safeguards in place for your CS team since they’re likely susceptible to this problem. Both too much criticism and too much care can lead to employee burnout.
Even despite doing all the things in this article right, you’re still likely to come up against people in your own and other organizations who don’t appreciate customer success. Whether it’s clients treating their CSMs as support agents, or internal teammates showing disrespect. It’s up to the leaders of the organization to build, curate, and reinforce an inclusive and customer-centric culture.
In Summary
In this post, we talked about the difference between proactive customer success and reactive customer support. We discussed the importance of customers, and what it means to be a truly customer-centric organization. Then we went through examples of CS done poorly and positive outcomes for when it’s been done well. We went over the minimum structures that are needed to consider when building your customer success system. And ended with challenges to be aware of despite best efforts.
Have questions about any of this? Curious about how you can apply customer success principles to your business? Let’s connect and see what I can do to help.